Hal Hinson

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Washington Post
For 420 reviews, this critic has graded:
  • 44% higher than the average critic
  • 1% same as the average critic
  • 55% lower than the average critic
On average, this critic grades 8.1 points lower than other critics. (0-100 point scale)

Hal Hinson's Scores

  • Movies
  • TV
Average review score: 58
Highest review score: 100 Hoop Dreams
Lowest review score: 0 Johnny Be Good
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 174 out of 420
  2. Mixed: 166 out of 420
  3. Negative: 80 out of 420
420 movie reviews
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    • 62 Metascore
    • 50 Hal Hinson
    Last Exit to Brooklyn
    Edel gives us the grungy details of the atrocities without providing a context to give them relevance. In the end, the film's ugliness becomes ugliness for its own sake.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 60 Hal Hinson
    Empire of the Sun
    Though Empire of the Sun is a profoundly perplexing, frustrating object, there are things in it to marvel at and enjoy.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 80 Hal Hinson
    A Man of No Importance
    A Man of No Importance is as rich and soulful as it is modest. [27 Jan 1995]
    • Washington Post
    • 50 Metascore
    • 40 Hal Hinson
    Honey, I Blew Up the Kid
    As one-joke movies go, it's fairly inoffensive but also never better than mildly diverting.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 40 Hal Hinson
    Major League
    Major League is shamelessly formulaic. At the beginning, when it uses Randy Newman's ironic ode to Cleveland ("City of light, city of magic"), the movie has a lovely tone, and briefly, you feel a surge of anticipation, as if the people making it might actually have an original point of view or some feel for the game. All hope is dashed, though, early on, when you realize that they are cannibalizing every other baseball movie. (Newman wrote the music for "The Natural.") This is movie-making by rip-off.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 88 Hal Hinson
    New Jack City
    The "Godfather" films transcended their mobster genre; New Jack City doesn't, but it's a great genre film, edgy, vibrant and full of urgent color.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 10 Hal Hinson
    Red Heat
    Red Heat is poorly, or even indifferently, made. It's a joyless exercise, and too much angry resignation seeps in for it to be very funny or very entertaining.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 80 Hal Hinson
    Hero
    It's cagey, funny and vivaciously smart. It may also be one of the worldliest fairy tales ever made, and that rarest of all things, a family film with real meat on its bones.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 90 Hal Hinson
    Bill & Ted's Bogus Journey
    There's nothing bogus about this locomotivated follow-up; it's a truly excellent adventure, hilariously inventive, greased-lightning paced and dumb-bunny brilliant.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 75 Hal Hinson
    The Comfort of Strangers
    An elegantly wrought bit of nastiness.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 50 Hal Hinson
    The Monster Squad
    Most of what's included in this unapologetically scrambled mixture of Goonies, Hardy Boys adventures, Ghostbusters and Abbott and Costello monster films is bad actors wandering around in bad makeup and rubber masks and two kinds of kids -- cute, intolerably noisy, smart-alecky kids and not-so-cute, noisy, smart-alecky kids. I don't know which kind I liked least.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 50 Hal Hinson
    Mo' Better Blues
    A jazz piece may be improvised, sketched out in the process of creation, but a movie resists that kind of spontaneity -- or requires skills that are beyond Lee's talents at the moment.
    • 40 Metascore
    • 20 Hal Hinson
    Lethal Weapon 3
    Lethal Weapon 3 is pretty much the same as "Lethal Weapon 2," which was pretty much the same as "Lethal Weapon."
    • 60 Metascore
    • 80 Hal Hinson
    Tin Cup
    Sexy, slap-happy links comedy.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 70 Hal Hinson
    Johnny Handsome
    Walter Hill's "Johnny Handsome" feels like a shiv jammed between your ribs in a prison-yard fight. It's clean and brutal and so ruthlessly efficient that it's opened a hole in you almost before you've realized it.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 50 Hal Hinson
    Juice
    Dickerson's point in this passable but rather routine picture is that no one is exempt from the spidery grip of frustrations brought on by poverty and a life of depressed opportunities; that, given these circumstances, anyone can pick up a gun as the only answer to his problems.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 90 Hal Hinson
    Stealing Beauty
    What's more, Bertolucci's voice is stronger, clearer and more effortlessly confident than it has been in years. He's stolen the beauty of Tuscany and his youthful star and transformed it into an exquisite work of movie art.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 50 Hal Hinson
    Point Break
    A lot of what Bigelow puts up on the screen bypasses the brain altogether, plugging directly into our viscera, our gut. The surfing scenes in particular are majestically powerful, even awe-inspiring. Bigelow's picture is a feast for the eyes, but we watch movies with more than our eyes. She seduces us, then asks us to be bimbos.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 80 Hal Hinson
    Days of Thunder
    If "Top Gun" was a stylish bimbo of a movie, all cleavage, white teeth and aerodynamic flash, then Days of Thunder is its paradoxical twin -- a bimbo with brains.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 10 Hal Hinson
    The Godfather: Part III
    The Godfather Part III isn't just a disappointment, it's a failure of heartbreaking proportions... It makes you wish it had never been made.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 63 Hal Hinson
    Untamed Heart
    The romantic fable Untamed Heart is hopelessly syrupy, preposterous and more than a little bit lame, but, still, somehow it got to me.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 37 Hal Hinson
    Mr. Holland's Opus
    As the years flash by, Mr. Holland ultimately discovers that he has given the world something much more valuable than a symphony; he has touched thousands of lives with the gift of music . . . blah, blah, blah. It almost makes you wanna hurl.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 40 Hal Hinson
    The Life and Times of Allen Ginsberg (re-release)
    Is it scintillating, nutty, madly inspired or ecstatically preposterous? Ginsberg himself is all these things, but this movie is not. (Review of Original Release)
    • 59 Metascore
    • 30 Hal Hinson
    Mission: Impossible
    Humorless, charmless and flat.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 50 Hal Hinson
    Memphis Belle
    All of the actors acquit themselves admirably, especially Stolz, who has a star's low-key magnetism, and the jazz stylist Harry Connick Jr., who makes his acting debut here as the drawling rear gunner. But the roles are too generic for anything like real depth. The fight scenes are about what you'd expect; they're competently shot, but even when they deliver thrills, every scene, every passage, is familiar. We've seen it all before.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 37 Hal Hinson
    The Ref
    As it unreels, The Ref keeps getting dumber, and, unfortunately, it simply wasn't that brilliant to begin with.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 40 Hal Hinson
    The Hot Spot
    Madsen may not be the most egregiously untalented of the new movie beauties, but she's close to it. As Dolly, she presents a Southern accent as ludicrous as any in captivity; she keeps trying for Blanche DuBois and coming out with Gomer Pyle.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 70 Hal Hinson
    Disclosure
    The spirit of the film, though, is snazzier and more playful than Crichton’s rather thin, humorless schematic. The subject is serious; thankfully, the movie is not.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 40 Hal Hinson
    The Object of Beauty
    Perhaps the shrewdest thing the filmmakers have done is call the film The Object of Beauty instead of A Thing of Beauty, which would make much more sense. By doing so they've removed what they must have known was a far-too-tempting opening for reviewers -- of saying A Thing of Beauty is not a joy forever. Even with the change, though, the sentiment fits.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 50 Hal Hinson
    Lean on Me
    Unfortunately, this isn't a role that requires an actor with Freeman's gifts -- in effect, his brilliance is irrelevant. The film is more a compilation of well-calculated cues than the presentation of a story, and all that the star is called on to do is hit his marks and prompt our responses. Avildsen, who sharpened his mastery of audience expectations on "Rocky" (which won him an Oscar) and the "Karate Kid" films, has a huckster's talent for keeping his audience on the line. This is not to take away from what Avildsen has done here. The movie is carefully and sometimes impressively laid out -- it's well "told." It's just that the skills he displays are not really those of a filmmaker -- or at least not one whose interest in his story goes beyond how to pitch it.
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